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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
“No animals were harmed in the making of this production”—you have probably seen that American Humane Society certified disclaimer in the closing credits of a movie or TV show. This morning’s Third Reading certainly would not get such a disclaimer, and no doubt the American Humane Society, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would all object, as others do, to Jesus’s letting a legion of demons destroy some 2-thousand “innocent” pigs. St. Luke’s divinely‑inspired Gospel account does not tell us exactly why God permitted the demons to destroy the pigs; it remains a secret of God. So, the pigs’ destruction (and other questions about the Reading) can become for us, as it became for the people of the region where it occurred, a distraction from its main point, “How Much Jesus Has Done”—“How Much Jesus Has Done”, both for the man from whom the demons had gone and for us.
With last week’s Gospel Reading we realized that those forgiven much love much, and in getting to this week’s Reading we have “fast forwarded”, as it were, past Jesus’s telling the Parable of the Sower, past His talking about how hearing the Word of God brings new family ties, and past His calming a storm as He and His disciples sailed across the Sea of Galilee. In today’s Third Reading, after He and His disciples sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, Jesus uses that same all-powerfulness that stilled the roaring of the waves of the sea to still the tumult of a man possessed by perhaps thousands of demons (Psalm 65:7). Today’s Third Reading is St. Luke’s longest and most‑dramatic account of an “exorcism”, though one could say Jesus did not really “cast out” the demons but that they left the man somewhat on their own. And, though St. Matthew and St. Mark also tell of this event, St. Luke’s account is the only one that our 3-year series of readings appoints for us to use in church, as we do today.
As the Third Reading narrates the event, a man possessed by demons meets Jesus in a hostile fashion. For a long time, the man had worn no clothes and had lived not in a house but among the tombs. Many times, the unclean spirits had seized the man, and attempts to keep the man under guard and bound with chains and shackles were unsuccessful; he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert. Though St. Luke does not explicitly say, Jesus clearly had compassion on the man suffering in these ways on account of the demons. When seeing Jesus, knowing Who Jesus was and apparently anticipating that Jesus was about to command them to come out of the man, the demons made the man cry out and fall down before Him. With a loud voice from the man, the demons beg Jesus not to torment them by commanding them to depart into the abyss prepared for their eternal punishment but to let them enter into a large herd of pigs feeding there on a hillside. Jesus lets them come out of the man and enter into the pigs, and the herd rushes down the steep bank into the Sea of Galilee and drowns. Those watching the herd flee to the nearby countryside and city and report what had happened. People from there come to see what had happened and are afraid at what they find. Those who had witnessed the event—Jesus’s disciples at a minimum—tell the people how the man once seized by demons had been saved. And the people of the region ask Jesus to leave because they are seized with a great fear—great fear that seems to relate in part to their valuing the loss of the pigs more than the saving of the man.
The presence of the Almighty God in the person of Jesus Christ miraculously prompts a legion of demons to leave a man whom they had possessed for a long time, and the people of the region ask Jesus to leave and thereby show that they reject Him. How sad! Yet, are we much different? How do we value the loss of material things more than eternal salvation? (We will hear more about the cost of discipleship next week, when we again “fast forward” through St. Luke’s Gospel account.) Do we also reject when He, for reasons kept secret from us, does not actively cause but passively permits things to happen that we think are bizarre or wrong? In today’s First Reading (Isaiah 65:1-9), God through Isaiah spoke prophetically about our rebelliousness, our walking in a way that is not good, our following our own devices, our provoking Him to His face continually, our saying to Him “Keep to Yourself, do not come near me.” All that behavior on our part, despite God’s readiness to be sought and found by those who did not ask for or seek Him.
Like the man with the unclean spirit in the Third Reading, living in an unclean place surrounded by death, we are surrounded by the death we by nature deserve on account of our sin—our original sin and our actual sins: valuing material things more than eternal salvation, rejecting God, or whatever our sin might be. In general we can say that, when God permits the devil to work harm against us, God is chastising us for our sin and calling us to repent of our sin—to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin—He forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake. We sang in the Office Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 825:1-2):
Rise, shine, you people!
Christ the Lord has entered / Our human story; God in Him is centered.
He comes to us, by death and sin surrounded, / With grace unbounded.
See how He sends the pow’rs of evil reeling;
He brings us freedom, light and life and healing.
All men and women, who by guilt are driven, / Now are forgiven.
As is often the case in the Bible, the demons knew Who Jesus was before others did. The demons in this man from the Gerasenes called Jesus “Son of the Most High God”, essentially what the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary He would be called (Luke 1:32, 35), and so He was. As we heard in today’s Second Reading, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” (Galatians 3:23-4:7). For the man from whom the demons had gone and for you and for me, Jesus—God in human flesh—out of His great mercy, grace, love, and compassion—died on the cross and rose again from the grave, in order to save him from his sins and us from our sins. By the end of the Reading, the man from whom the demons had gone also knew Who Jesus was: when Jesus sends Him away to declare how much God had done for him, the man went away proclaiming how much Jesus had done for him. God also does much for us, by grace through faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the response the people of the Gerasenes, as well as you and I, should have to God’s presence among us in Jesus.
In the Third Reading, Jesus was present for the man from whom the demons had gone, as he sat at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and Jesus is so present for us today, through His Word and Sacraments. The man from whom the demons had gone heard Jesus’s word and took the posture of a disciple, as do we hearing His Word preached. Jesus and His disciples must have given the man literal clothes; in Holy Baptism, as the Second Reading reminded us, Jesus clothes us with Himself and His righteousness. At the font, God the Father sends the Spirit of His Son into our hearts and we are said to put Christ on. As we sang in the Opening Hymn, one penned by a Welshman nearly a century ago, the “Holy Spirit is ever working / Through the Church’s ministry; / Quick’ning, strength’ning, and absolving, Setting captive sinners free … ever binding / Age to age and soul to soul / In communion never ending …” (Lutheran Worship 164:3). In these ways, Jesus is present for us to forgive us and so to save us.
In the Third Reading, the man from whom the demons had gone begged Jesus to be with Him as Jesus got into the boat to return to Capernaum, but Jesus sent the man away, commanding him to return home and declare how much God has done for him. Since the people of the Gerasenes had asked Jesus to depart from them, they needed someone else to speak to Jews and Gentiles in that region, and the man did just that. Likewise, in keeping with our vocations, you and I declare how much God in Jesus has done for us—if not in the body, surely in the soul. Indeed, in today’s Psalm we said with the psalmist: “Many are saying of my soul, there is no salvation for him in God, but … I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from His holy hill … Salvation belongs to the Lord …” (Psalm 3:2, 4, 8). By the Lord’s mercy and grace, His salvation belongs also to us, even if we do not yet have the full appreciation of it.
Some of you probably heard the news this past week that “Exodus International” is closing its doors; for four decades the group advocated so‑called “conversion therapy” as a “cure” for homosexual attractions. The president of the group for the last decade now says he no longer thinks it is possible to change someone’s sexual orientation through therapy. Well, in a word, no, it is not! Perhaps as the people of the Gerasenes in today’s Third Reading came to realize with the man possessed by a legion of demons, the only cure is Christ. And the same is true for us: no matter the temptations and difficulties that you and I or anyone else may face (including bodily possession in some cases), the only cure is Christ. We may wish that He would deliver us all at once from our sin‑corrupted, increasingly feeble bodies of death, but, really, even the man in the Third Reading did not get that. Christ in His wisdom permits us to face temptations and difficulties, and He in His wisdom enables us to live each day both with sorrow over the times we give in to those temptations and with faith that He forgives those sins by redeeming us with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.
When we get past the distractions of the pigs’ destruction and of other questions we might have about the Third Reading, we see its main point that in Jesus, God was present and working His mighty acts of salvation for the man possessed by a legion of demons. In Jesus, God is present and working His mighty acts of salvation for us even now—that is “How Much Jesus Has Done” for us, and, in His way and time, He will bring it to completion for us.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +